Weaveworks Adds Progressive Deployment for Kubernetes
Weaveworks this week delivered an update to its GitOps platform that enables application development and deployment teams to progressively deploy applications in a way that makes it simpler to recover in the event there is an issue.
The Weaveworks GitOps 2022.09 update also enables DevOps teams to actively enforce security and other best practices policies that are applied to their clusters and namespaces at multiple points in the software life cycle: Pull request, build, deploy and runtime. A curated library of more than 100 policies is also provided.
Finally, the latest release adds an enhanced version of team workspaces that provides support for multitenancy and application portability to better enable the segmentation of responsibilities and enforcement of change control policies to improve overall governance.
Weaveworks COO Steve George says Weave GitOps 2022.09 provides a dashboard to constantly monitor the progressive deployment of an application on Kubernetes clusters and, when necessary, automate recovery without requiring developers to make any changes to their application code. Progressive delivery mitigates the risk issues that might arise because of a poor deployment of an application, he says.
The Weaveworks GitOps platform is based on Flux, an open source tool being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Flux automatically ensures that the state of a cluster matches the configuration stored in a Git repository. It uses an operator in the cluster, dubbed Flagger, to trigger application deployments to Kubernetes without requiring IT teams to acquire and deploy a dedicated continuous delivery platform.
Flux monitors all image repositories, detects new images, triggers deployments and updates configurations accordingly. On top of the core platform is Team Workspaces, a workflow application for tracking changes to Git-based deployments that can be used by multiple DevOps teams. Each workspace can also span multiple Kubernetes clusters to simplify the rollout of applications across a fleet of Kubernetes clusters.
In effect, Weave GitOps combines a set of best practices with an automation platform that ensures that all policies have been met as an application moves from the pipeline used to create it into a production environment. Those policies comply with the Open Policy Agent (OPA) framework to make it possible to programmatically implement them.
It’s not clear whether organizations are embracing GitOps to automate application delivery. While continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms have been around for years, the number of organizations that have successfully implemented CD is still rather limited. A standard set of APIs provided by Kubernetes clusters can be deployed anywhere from the network edge to the cloud using tools and platforms optimized for CD.
In the longer term, however, George says there is a clear need to expand the reach and scope of the Weeaveworks GitOps platform beyond Kubernetes clusters because most organizations don’t want to have to employ a separate CD platform to support legacy application environments.
In the meantime, the more pervasively Kubernetes clusters are employed the rate at which organizations embrace GitOps will only continue to grow.
